It’s hardly a secret that opposition to illegal immigration is one of the defining issues of the contemporary Republican Party. GOP leaders have spent years insisting that the nation’s survival is dependent in large part on strengthening border security and targeting undocumented immigrants in the United States.

What’s too often left out of the public conversation, however, is the number of party leaders who speak with equal vigor against legal immigration.

In May, for example, JD Vance sat down with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat and fleshed out his perspective about the degree to which immigrants — not just undocumented immigrants, but anyone coming to American soil from somewhere else — adversely affect “social solidarity.” The vice president added that his principal concern was with “social cohesion” that new arrivals somehow undermine by being different in ways he didn’t identify.

Six months later, the Ohio Republican fielded questions from University of Mississippi students at an event organized by Turning Point USA, an organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, where he took additional steps down the same path. The Associated Press reported:

Vice President JD Vance advocated a slowdown in legal immigration Wednesday, saying, ‘We have to get the overall numbers way, way down.’ … Vance said the optimal number of legal immigrants to admit is ‘far less than what we’ve been accepting,’ but he did not offer a firm number when pressed by a woman who questioned his stance.

He went on to complain that the U.S. hasn’t fully built “a sense of common identity” in response to recent arrivals, and as such, “you’ve got to be careful about any additional immigration, in my view.”

The public remarks coincided with the release of New York Post columnist Miranda Devine’s podcast interview with Vance, which included a quote from the vice president about his rejection of the melting pot model of the American story.

“It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers,’” he said. “And the fact that we had an immigration system that actually promoted that division is a real, real disgrace.”

Kevin Kruse, a historian at Princeton University, noted soon after via Bluesky, “This is exactly the same argument — and, in parts, even the same language — that segregationists advanced to argue that white people had a ‘right’ not to live next to people who were different from them.”

It’s not uncommon to hear political observers make the case that Republicans are against illegal border crossings and those who overstay visas, but they’re not against a process in which immigrants play by the rules and enter the U.S. legally. The next time you hear this claim, keep Vance’s anti-immigrant rhetoric in mind.